The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [105]
A woman walks into the park through the West Gate: strawberry-blond hair, a blueberry parka, and pressed blue jeans. Her legs are elongated to spindliness by the sun’s glare on the snow. She walks toward the savage girl, glancing nervously to either side. Other than the occasional car sliding down Shields Street, there’s no one else around. Ursula looks down to where the savage girl sits cross-legged on the bench, chin resting on fingers clasped over the top of her hatchet, eyes staring straight ahead, as unseeing, probably, as the rotting sockets of the gray-furred dog’s head she now wears as a hat. For a moment the savage girl turns and looks in the direction of the approaching woman, but then straightaway she returns to looking at nothing, which presumably she finds more interesting. The woman passes by Ursula, exchanging a cautious, almost pleading glance with her as she continues on, walking slower now, approaching the savage girl, her impeccably shagged hair brushing the back of her coat as she cocks her head this way and that. A few feet away from the savage girl she stops and makes a short sound: Ahp. The sound is short because she chokes off the end of the syllable. Simultaneously her arm rises and her trembling, knitted-gloved finger points at the savage girl, who again looks up at her and again loses interest and looks away.
Ah—ohhhhhhhhh.
It’s a kind of whimper coming from the strawberry-blond woman now. She backs off a few steps, almost trips, then turns and runs back the way she came. The savage girl displays no reaction.
Is she that grotesque? Maybe Ursula has simply gotten used to that red, scar-encrusted lizard face of hers. Or maybe there’s something new in that face that Ursula hasn’t gotten close enough recently to see: a maggot eating a hole through a cheek, perhaps, or a gangrenous nose beginning to detach itself from the skull.
Maybe the girl is sick. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been doing much lately.
Or maybe not; maybe she’s just the industrious ant all prepared for winter, all her provisions carefully stowed away, nothing to do now but wait until spring so she can start preparing for next winter. Maybe today was too warm for her to think about firewood. It has been unnaturally warm, the sun shining even as a new coat of snow wafted down earlier in the day. Ursula is even sweating a little in her regulation Arctic exploration coat. Olive drab. Not her color. Not particularly well camouflaged, either, but she’s long since given up hiding. There’s nowhere to hide, anyway. Ursula has begun to entertain her own little paranoid ideas, begun to conceive of the universe as a bounded panoptical dystopia at the center of which sits a cosmic, multidimensional version of Chas Lacouture, watching the human race with a zillion callous eyes, his bloodless superstring lips twisted into a Möbius sneer of eternal contempt as he presses the buttons of a zillion obscuranting Javiers to make them go around and rave about how the world is a relativist utopia of ever-malleable, ever-proliferating realities, a vast playpen with no other purpose than to nurture the divine spark of creativity within each of us and grow the human imagination into godhood. It’s kind of a dark little life, she’s found, being a paranoiac, but it’s also not without its comforts—at least this way she’s never alone, never insignificant, everlastingly secure in the knowledge there’s someone out there who cares enough about her to give her life some consistency, to arrange it into a definite order, a coherent, comprehensible hell.
The other consolation, of course, is that there’s no need for her to try to do anything in particular with her life, since it’s all been foreordained to fail anyhow. In a world designed to thwart you, doing nothing isn’t a matter of sloth, it’s a matter of pride, the only possible expression of personal dignity. She could take up Buddhism, or bridge, or day trading, she supposes. There are all kinds of ways of doing nothing. But this one, for the time being, seems as good